Phantom MS Symptoms

Multiple Sclerosis can be a disease stacked high with so called “invisible” symptoms — things which happen to our bodies which no one else can see. These maladies can range from (but are not limited to) fatigue, pain, numbness, cognitive dysfunction, bladder and/or bowel issues and the list goes on.

There are also, in the wonderful world of our stupid commonality, which can be even more frustrating to explain: Phantom Symptoms.

We’ve chatted here and again on “the cold hand of MS” in our pages before. A new one woke me in the early hours before the roster down the lane made his morning announcements and so I thought we’d talk about them again.

By definition, a phantom sensation is something which we experience but isn’t really happening. The creepy crawlies that feel like bugs on our skin are a perfect example. I will often get an icy cold drip falling onto my thigh which feels like water or wax splashing onto my leg. Many of you have chimed in over the years with some of your not-really-there experiences.

This morning — so early it should be called last night — I woke sleeping on my left side to a vibration in the

bed that was so very real that I thought maybe someone had but a washing machine on the spin cycle under our bed. I eventually understood that it was something MS and that I wasn’t really vibrating when I was awake enough to analyze the sensation.

First, the bed was not moving. That was pretty easy to ascertain. Next I came to understand that it was only the left side of my body which was feeling the harmonic bodily hum. Still, the sensation was so real that I placed my right hand all over my port side to see if I could feel any movement. None was to be had.

It’s one thing to have a tic or twitch that I can say to Caryn, “can you feel [or see] this happening to me” and he can experience the oddity as well. To feel something which really isn’t happening is a whole other level of crazy.

Whatever lesion on whatever part of my electrical system that was causing the formidable rumble was only affecting my left side, but it was the entirety of that side of my body — from the center of my spine to the to my sternum and from crown to heal. It lessoned when I rolled to my back and became even fainter when I continued to my starboard beam, but it didn’t disappear altogether.

As I sit (still many hours before the XXX is scheduled to make his daily chariot run across the sky) I still note a faint vibration in every part of that side. My teeth, my ears, fingers, buttock, toenails… it’s just there. But it isn’t, for nothing is really moving there. This thing that I can feel from the inside cannot be experienced by anyone else or even the part of me intimate enough to share the same skin and organs.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trevis Gleason

Trevis L. Gleason is a food journalist and published author, an award-winning chef and culinary instructor who has taught at institutions such as Cornell University, New England Culinary Institute and...read more